Leer Soft Tonneau Cover - Roll Up - Vinyl and Aluminum

Video Transcript for Leer Soft Tonneau Cover Review

What's up everybody It's AJ with etrailer.com. Today we're gonna be checking out this LEER tonneau cover; it's the SR250 and this is gonna be a soft tonneau cover that also rolls up. So in this instance, on this truck they had a hard tonneau cover that constantly gets in the way. It folds up in four panels and would lean against the cab but because they have a gooseneck in there sometimes that would hit up on there and damage the hard one. This one's gonna be a soft, it's gonna take up less space when you go to roll it up here and that way if it gets bumped into, it's a soft cover, it's not gonna damage anything, it's gonna be more out of the way, more room. Usually people like to recommend the hard tonneau covers just because they're more secure, it's hard to get into 'em.

Sure you could probably get into this one or rip it if you wanted it to but the owner of the truck, Jake, he has to take his off all the time because it's that hard tonneau cover. This one's gonna be way easier to roll up and stay out of the way. It's still secure. It's still gonna keep everything in your bed of your truck dry. So this cover on there keeps everything out of sight out of mind too.

So the people won't see it and they won't get curious to come over here and reach in the bed and try and take something. You got it locked up with your tailgate. It'll be just fine. You have three support beams in here too. There's one here.

And the whole thing, the whole cover is made out of a vinyl. So it's gonna be nice with the elements and you're not gonna have any issues with it. It's not gonna get damaged and it can take the rain and snow and all that. Now let's go ahead and lower the tailgate and see how it operates. You got two switches on either side and you just pinch them together and that releases the tonneau cover.

You see the hooks come undone here on the side. Then you can just push it up that easy. I really liked that because some of 'em have so much tension built on 'em, when you go to undo them on these soft covers sometimes they pop up really hard. So I'm used to pushing down when I undo this but I'm gonna show you I'm not gonna put my hand there. You just hear a slight click, that means it's unlocked. And then you can just fold it backwards which is nice that it doesn't pop up so aggressively. You don't have to worry about getting upper cutter or something like that when you're going to roll up your tonneau cover. So now you can easily just roll it back towards the front of the truck. You got the hook and loop there on the side. As I roll it, you can kind of see it comes up. The side rails are nice and align. I've done this a few times going back and forth and it aligns with it pretty well. You don't have to do too much adjustment. Sometimes you have to go back and forth and stretch out the tonneau cover and make sure the hook and loop attaches but on this one, it lines up every time. So now I've got it rolled back there I'm gonna hop in the bed of the truck and show you how to secure it down. So if you want to ride around with it rolled up you can, you just use these clips. Looks like I can roll this side just a little bit more got a little out of sync there. So bring this around, and there's a buckle right here. Good there, you can tighten it up and that's gonna hold it in place. That way you can drive down the road and not worry about it coming undone or having any issues. I'm gonna do that same thing on the other side. This is the gooseneck in his bed of the truck, that I was talking about it earlier. So if you think, when he's hauling his fifth wheel it's got its front end probably comes up here and in the other plastic cover that folds up would probably come out to about here. So that's where it was hitting. That's where the damage is on the covers, when he goes to turn, one of the corners goes into it. You can see just by looking at it I'm standing probably right where the fifth wheel goes and I'm not running into this soft cover at all. There's a lot more space there. And even if it did, since this a soft cover, it would hit the bar a little bit. It wouldn't dent or damage anything. And when you're ready to unroll it, I just unbuckled here from the front. I'm gonna put my buckle here, clips in, it just keeps it up and out of the way, that way it doesn't get tangled in with this. And then just unroll it. You can see how it's going along the hook and loop just fine. I will come back and push down on it. But when you put the tension on it and actually pushed down on the tonneau cover, it really goes even closer. See, now you can see. I'll hop down. Come back and just push down the side. It's nice cause it's really easy. Sometimes they don't align that easy and you'll have to pull it up and it might happen over time, depending on how long it's left in the sun or what happens in winter. You can just pull it over a little bit. But not bad for unrolling it and then showing it right away it goes right into place. Something I want to point out is this weather strip here. Now sometimes there's a problem with these on the newer trucks with the auto tailgates that drop down on their own. There's issues with opening 'em, because this is too thick. This one is pretty thin, so I don't think it's getting your way. It shouldn't have any problems with that. I know we get a lot of questions. I just wanted to point that out and explain that. And it's just because it's thin though it's still gonna keep that weather out. So you're not gonna get any rain or anything in your tailgate. It's also pretty easy to install. It didn't take us very long. It has three clamps that attach to the rails on each side and I only needed one tool and it was already included. So I really liked that I didn't have to keep going back and forth to the toolbox to find the right stuff. I would put it on there pretty quickly on the truck and then have to make any trips. Check out how we did it. First step we're gonna do is add our seal here towards the front. You wanna lay this down, peel off the plastic and kind of go along the bulkhead here on the back of your truck and make sure the lip faces towards the back window. And you'll go all the way down. Now we're not permanently installing this tonneau cover today so I'm not gonna peel the tape and waste this but that's what you wanna do when you're installing it on yours. We're gonna prepare the rails to put them on the side of your bed. First we're gonna slide the clamps in this channel here. This is kinda unique. I've done a few tonneau covers and usually you have to hold the clamp up there while you hold this at the same time. It's kind of nice that you slide this in the channel and you slide it down and the clamps stay in place. It just makes it easier when you go to tighten it down. You also want to make sure that they're pretty loose because of how you're gonna have to set it on the bed rails. Now we'll get to that part in just a second. Now when you look at your rails, you wanna make sure that the hook and loop goes towards the outside and you have this latch here that's gonna go towards the back of your bed. That way you know that's where you unlatch the cover to roll it up. So now we're ready to set on our side rails. And you're gonna line up with the rails and you kinda want to tilt it just a little bit. This is why I said make sure it's nice and loose cause this clamp that's gonna slide up under this lip of the rail. And so that's how it's gonna attach. So this part's a little different too. You gotta make sure they're all loose, so they can slide up and under. It looks like, it needs to go a bit higher but looks like they're all under there. So now I'm gonna start tightening them down. It's good to put some downward pressure here on the side rail so it doesn't tilt up while you're tightening it down. We're gonna start with the bottom screws here. We'll get those tightened back up. That's tight. We'll come back and do this one now too just a little bit might have done too tight. You can see how that helps hold it in place. So I'm gonna go down the clamps and do the bottom ones first and then come back and tighten these. With these tightened down I'm gonna go back and remove this bottom screw on all the clamps. Now make sure you test that they're still holding on there pretty good when you move the screw cause it might shift just a little bit when you loosen this and take it off. And see already I took this out, it shifts a little bit more than it did before. So I'm just gonna come back and tighten that down on each clamp. Now we're gonna set down tonneau cover itself. I wanna point out at the bottom you can see the textured. You wanna match that up with the front of your rails. It's gonna fit right in there. Set it down in place. You want the buckles facing the back of your cab. Come back over here, make sure it's lined up right in there Now with it set in place, you want to tilt it up and you can see it's got that spacing in there. You're gonna take your bolt kinda come in at an angle so it slides in the channel like that. Slide it over to the-- Oh, it came out. So just do the same thing, slide it over to the end and we're gonna line it up for the hole that's in our rails here on the side. Drop it down in there and make sure it's down in there on both sides. And then we'll come back with our washer and lock washer. Place those up there. And we'll start screwing in our hand dial there. And as that goes up, we're gonna follow it up with our stopper. That way it keeps it from backing off. So we'll get it pretty hand tight. We wanna go back and forth and made sure I adjusted evenly. That way it pulls it down and holds it there. Next step is to roll out the cover and make sure it fits. Now we might have to adjust it up here a little bit. What they recommend is rolling it out and seeing if it's not tight enough or it's not aligned correctly, we can loosen these bolts and move this more towards the cab or more towards the back of the vehicle, whatever we need. So we're gonna roll it out and see how it looks. Looks like we might need to move it back just a little bit cause we can see how far this is from here. Cause that's where it's gonna sit and rest and we'll want to pull it down like that. Clearly we're a little bit short here. So I'm gonna roll it back up and make those adjustments. Made those adjustments so we're rolling it back out and seeing if we didn't fix the issues we we're having. Already looks way better. You see I can still move it out here. It sets in that channel, make sure it's on both sides even. Then we just push it down and it should nice and tight. With it folded down we're gonna shut our tailgate. So that shuts this, doesn't get in the way at all. We're gonna go around the sides and make sure it looks nice and even. Probably pushed down the hook and loop to make sure that fastens in the place. Everything looks pretty nice. It's pulled pretty tight. Let's check the other side real quick. So aside from that one adjustment we had to make this wasn't too bad of an install. It was pretty easy. Well, I think that does it. Thanks for hanging out. And I hope this helped..